That's correct. I've updated the text to reflect such.The iPhone Simulator is free with the SDK, as I understand it. The $99 is for when you want to actually test your application on an actual device and/or upload it for sale/download.
If you are using wireless, you have to be on VPN.no go. this is incredibly frustrating. can't send mail out on campus or off campus.
The last thing we need to do is screw it up by picking key fields via the 'dart board' method, and compounding the error by using non-secret information as shared secrets.Exactly.
If you are on campus, continue to use smtp.cwru.edu.what is the SMTP settings to send out???
Are you sure that list is correct, though? Last time I checked, most adjunct faculty want to get paid, which means they would have an employee ID.I know we handle some Adjunct Faculty who aren't in Peoplesoft. I don't know the entire extent of them who are or aren't in it. There's enough of them not in it to warrant being on the list.
Do CIA students have our email?Yep.
The library has been using LDAP numbers for a long time now.By "LDAP numbers" do you mean cwruEduIDPerson?
2. AdobeAdobe? Really?
301?getting the dreaded SMTP "relaying denied" error on all outgoing mail.That's weird. What SMTP server are you using? Are you trying this through GoogleApps Webmail and getting this error?
You didn't actually purchase a Motorola KRZR, did you? On this, the week of that *other* phone's release?Work phone. Got a new work phone.
To do an authenticated RSS feed, you have to use Basic HTTP authYes, that is true. That is actually something I've wanted out of
mod_cas. The ability for it to pass authentication control to another layer if certain circumstances are met. That is, if a request comes over with the
Authorization HTTP header already set,
mod_cas allows this authentication to fall to another module (
mod_auth_ldap, for example).It would also be nice if you could exchange a CAS service ticket for LDAP information, for example.That is an awesome idea. That would fix the disconnect we've been having with CAS and good-practice-uid-reader accounts. I'm not sure how we would do it, though... But it's a great idea.
Maybe you could add a variable to be passed to CAS that is a URL to a skin file that CAS would read and put the login box into?That may open up CAS to a phishing vector of attack. I'll have to expound on that more in a separate blog entry, though. I tried typing it up in a comment, but it was too long and too ramble-on-y.
To secure our PodCast media I had to write an Apache module that integrated basic HTTP auth with both the LDAP servers, and our database of rosters for students.I'm not entirely sure what the your requirements are, but I believe that should be entirely possible via CAS. For example, http://its-wiki.case.edu. That site does its authentication via CAS. But after authentication during the authorization phase, it uses mod_auth_ldap to make sure you are one of the 100 or so people actually allowed to enter it. Could you describe that one in a little more detail? I think that that should be easily doable with CAS for authentication and a regular authorization module (mod_auth_ldap, mod_auth_mysql, etc., etc.) to manage access.
I don't see whay the password script was a standout item. If you would not mind giving me a little more info on why that was really bad I would like to know.Sure. I'm happy to help out. There are many characters that can require URL encoding/decoding. Having to account for them all would be difficult (what happens when someone's password includes "æ" or a "è" character) and would actually be nearly impossible because the space character " " (the space character is hard to represent when typing). According to the spec, spaces can be represented via "%20" or the plus "+" sign in URLs. It's tricky (and inconsistent) when one happens over the other. Attempting to encode/decode all of the different characters that undergo (or can undergo) URL encoding/decoding in Javascript would be a lot of work to make sure you have complete coverage. Unit tests on that code would help (there'd be a lot of tests to write) make sure maximal coverage was achieved. Personally, I'm far too lazy to write that much Javascript. Javascript does have the built-in functions espace() and unescape() that may help. YMMV with the use of those functions.
My first thought when I heard about it was "why not just use YouTube?"I had thought that, too. There is something to be said for being able to bring some of this video content underneath the "case.edu" brand. In addition to that, underneath the domain, it is easier to restrict access (if that feature where to be added).
There are times when it completely fails to update. We're talking like a day or two to post a comment.Yea, that's probably the spam counter-measures being overly aggressive. If you post a comment to an entry that is a week old, it automatically goes into moderation and you have to wait for the owner of the blog to approve it. That will be fixed in the next revision. Not saying anyone should hold their breath and wait for it... I just wanted to point out that we know it's a problem and we have plans to correct it.
the other day a new post was added and clicking anywhere on the screen basically forwarded you to the podcastOkay... that's just weird. Maybe some errant HTML made its way into the post causing that...? I don't know. That's a weird one.
I think that Nick is saying that there are enough variables that an outside message board would be a simpler solution, than to wait it out.Oh, I wasn't trying to suggest he did otherwise. I just wanted to know the specific "uncooperative" actions blog.case.edu was doing, so I could make sure that the next version fixed them. Thanks for the feedback.
I am the #1 Mano Singham on Google!You're also first for "singham" and third for "mano."
Will I have this OpenID forever, even after I graduate?Right now, the service is experimental; but assuming the service persists, yes, you will have the OpenID account indefinitely.
have my website delegating it so I only have to remember http://benjamingolub.com.You could also delegate to Case's OpenID. If you view the source to the main page of my blog, you can see the markup that allows one to do that. It looks like the following (I see that on your blog, you've already done delegation, I'm just putting this here for others reading this):
<link rel="openid.server"
href="https://login.case.edu/id">
<link rel="openid.delegate"
href="http://jeremy.smith.id.case.edu">
I'll be posting more about OpenID in the near future that should help flesh out this documentation.despite my visceral opposition to this way of thinkingCare to elaborate?
Will my primary abc123@case.edu and firstname.lastname@case.edu forward forever as well?Affirmative. They will work. And it is written down that the "abc123" and the "first.last" components are permanent. "Subdomain-ing" (changing email addresses from abc123@case.edu to abc123@alumni.case.edu or abc12@really-we-are-changing-it-as-a-service-to-you.case.edu) the email address (I don't believe) is guaranteed to never happen. Reasons that may change may involve technical limitations of future mail servers implemented, or may come from certain branding or marketing decisions, or may just happen. As long as I'm still working in ITS, I'll lobby against the changes. That's pretty much the only guaratee I can offer there.
Go ColtsGo Bears. (I'm a lifelong diehard Chicago fan.)
the JIDs issued to users are of the form "NetworkID@messenger.case.edu" - I'm wondering if changing it to "NetworkID@case.edu" would be better?I think NetworkID@case.edu would be better.
Better now?Yes, awesome! Thanks, John!
Preventing the server from spending CPU time *regenerating* content that hasn't been updated is a different issue from preventing the server from *resending* content the client already has.Affirmative. Indeed it is. Some web frameworks' "caching layers" send "200 - Ok" responses even when the data it has is the same data the client has. That's just the tip of the iceberg. Conditional
GETs open up a whole other side of the coin that many web frameworks like to pretend doesn't exist.Are you sure there are web frameworks that re-implement client-side caching? ... it means managing server-side caching, which has nothing to do with HTTP.They don't re-implement client side caching, per se. What they do is uselessly use server-side caching, when responding with
304s would do just fine.If you look at PHP from a language feature point of view, it is up there in ranks with Java and C++.Ranks "up there?" When I think of a language heavy in "features," Java and C++ do not come to mind. I guess it depends on what you define as a "feature" of a language.
you won't find in the base distribution of other languagesI think that might be where the problem starts. With PHP, everything is wrapped in the "base distribution."
The general consensus is that object-oriented code is easy to maintain"4 of out 5 Computer Scientists recommend daily use of object orientation to improve maintainability."</tongue location="cheek"> There is nothing inherent in object oriented code that makes it easier to maintain. It's just as easy to write bad OOP as it is to write bad FP, AOP, etc.
you don't hear people saying Java is hard to maintainI'll say it. Java is hard to maintain (if programmed by a bad programmer).
there are many Java success stories in enterpriseSun's (and Oracle's and IBM's) marketing machine at work. You don't have many empassioned engineers writing blog entries about how Java "saved their project." You do get a lot of whitepapers generated from places like the Burton Groups of the world doing that. (Related note: http://troutgirl.com/blog/index.php?/archives/22_Friendster_goes_PHP.html) It's never technology that produces bad code. It's people. That being said, there are a lot of things in PHP's base distribution that gives rise to some concerns.
It seems to remain gray for the “forest†color scheme in your latest revision.Whoops. Fixed that.
Is there just one masthead image for each color, or should those be independent?Which image; the one on the left (the logo with background coloring) or the one on the right (pictures of the campus/pictures of students in the library or on computers) that is "toned" ("blended," maybe?) to the color scheme.
When you're ready, I'd be happy to sit down with you and go over design/navigational do's and don'ts to make the end product compliant.That'd be great, Heidi!
Great progress!Thanks!
the background image in the banner disappears in 7 and positioning goes wonky in 6.Yea... the IE stuff isn't going to be fun.
the h1 is hovering above the baseline. It should be flush on the bottom.Hmmm... I think I see it. I'll have to twiddle with that and see if I can't get the
h1 to squeeze down some more. Thanks for the screenshots, Heidi!You can do the pipes without adding anything to the markup:Nice! I'll be adding that into my Round 2 v2.ul li + li:before { content: " | "; }
The biggest obstacles I faced were those of browser compatibility.I'm sure that is the biggest obstacle I will face, too. And... I'm not looking forward to applying the IE hacks. I've never been good with that. It's my Achilles' Heel of CSS -- "I just can't do IE."
Looks fine in Opera and Konqueror, nice work!Excellent! Thanks, Brian!
http://host.case.edu/foo to create the resource
http://host.case.edu/foo/bar. Before they are allowed in, they are redirected to CAS, their credentials are verified, and they're allowed access to
/foo to create
/foo/bar Use case #2 is that
http://host.case.edu/foo is also an Atom Publishing Protocol (APP) endpoint. So the user wants to use their APP client to create
/foo/bar (APP leverages HTTP Auth). For this to happen, the APP client is either going to have to a) know how to do CAS (and Pubcookie, and WebAuth, and CWL, and Bluestem, and etc.), or b) mod_cas will check down to using standard HTTP Auth for interoperability and being a good standards compliant HTTP citizen.taking this further with the excellent S5So I just kinda assumed S5 was the natural progression.
Jeremy, did you look at any of the themes over at KDE-look.org?No.
Please eschew. I think the cool kids are off gentoo now, but let me get back to you.They are? Then what are the Cool Kids® using nowadays? They are so hard to keep up with.
uniical, one could come very close to implementing synchronization. (It would get hairy.) But that solution would *only* work with GCal. To get the best interoperability, you would need another layer in there to emulate WebDAV. (And possible another to do CalDAV... I've never really been sure of the differences between WebDAV and CalDAV.).ics file imported into Oracle calendar, then someone adds a meeting to the person's Oracle calendar? Would the
uniical import overwrite the meeting? Basically, does a
uniical import command do an append or an overwrite?Can someone explain to me exactly what kind of "standard" CSS is, anyway?Yes. I can. It's W3C standard that's been implemented incorrectly in some browsers. Dvorak's complaints about CSS are unfounded. His complaints would be similar to buying a car with square wheels and then complaining to the city to notch the roads accordingly. Many browsers out there have square wheels. But just because they exist, don't take your frustrations out on the pavement.
Just out of curiousity, why do you characterize EDUCAUSE as a standards organization?They produce standards such as eduPerson and have Working Groups such as the Middleware Architecture Committee for Education and Wireless Networking WG.
It is only a matter of time...Thus my statement about being able to successfully login. After playing with it for a bit, still can't find a URL for a iCal file.
With OSS, you can get separate components without the extra cost.There are non-OSS systems that can be deployed following "SOA" philosophies.
you need this new service to integrate with the collaboration suite. You assign the task of investigating the integration. Two weeks later, people get back to you and say that the new service can't integrate with the collaboration suite because the collaboration suite doesn't have a sufficient remote interface.Often times, when engineers conclude that interoperability can't occur between systems X and Y, managers conclude that it is the failings of the engineers and not the systems. Why? Because often times, it's true. The are just as many stupid engineers as there are good ones (50% of engineers are below average ;-) ). Regardless, your original premise is true – small pieces loosely joined. Unfortunately, that doesn't stop people who misunderstand the original concepts or have alternate agendas from just claiming monolithic systems are "SOA." It's why SOA is no longer descriptive of anything.
I can pass their idea about how to fix the space shuttle on to NASA.Awesome! Can you tell the engineers to put a hyperdrive in the shuttle? That could get places waaaay faster that way. Thanks!
It's not REST. If you find yourself typing something like the following in your API documentation... [y]ou know it's not REST.The problem with their API is not directly tied to what URLs they are using. From their documentation:
The AddItem Request This request adds an owner-item relationship. The parameters are:...What they are doing is using a
GET request to "add an owner-item relationship." That is, if you execute a
GET to a URL like: http://server1.easyutil.com/recommend.php?cid=123&operation=AddItem&owner=jms18&tag=foo&item=widget You end up changing the state of the server... through a
GET! Imagine a web crawler hitting tons of those different URLs making
GET requests over
GET requests constantly changing the state of the server over and over again. That is
not RESTful. Did that make it more clear? I'm worried that my ramblings are making things murky. One of the rules of REST:
GET should be idempotent.If that were true, then what's wrong with: /api.php?method=user.FindById&id=47Right, there's nothing inherently wrong with that URL.
you want mod_authz_sympa? Here it is.Coooooool
I think this whole thing is like a rorschach test. People see in it what ever they want to see. You guys see blogging.It's true.
Yeah, it's really amazing how bad the default style is.Yea, sorry 'bout that. I'm not too good at web design.
someone has to pre-populate the system with interesting groups (like the per-course groups you alluded to). Is this what you see as the big difficulty in implementing the service?That is one difficulty. I mentioned the Student Data Rewrite project in that we will be including enrollment information in the data feed. So we will actually begin having that information and can provision a grouping system accordingly. I've had talks with USG people in the past. They control the group membership in to student organizations. They would be willing to replicate that information up to us (by writing into LDAP, maybe, or using whatever other grouping API we cook up). For the rest of the groups, you use whatever else to populate and manage them. Sympa... a web app... something else...
it sounds a lot like something that could be handled by the LDAP service.Yes it does. Use LDAP to store all of the groups. Use mod_auth_ldap to handle authz on the services.
The operations also seem really similar to the ones provided by Sympa.Yes it does. Use Sympa to handle all of the groups. Sympa has a set of web services. You could build pages off of those web services to handle the group operations. You could develop a mod_authz_sympa to handle authorization at the Apache level.
f extending an existing service won't work, then it seems that a fairly simple database design with a lightweight web-service shell around it would suffice.Yep, that would work, too. Develop a simple DB with a wrapper around it for operations. Integrate Sympa to it (instead of the other way around). Integrate LDAP to it (instead of the other way around). With the information in the DB being replicated out to LDAP, you can use mod_auth_ldap to do authz on Apache servers. That's 3 of my 4 sketches.
well what problems did you run into?Storing the data and representing it in a way that a multitude of services could access it.
Would a Facebook-like app built on top of the API use the API to store and manage all of its info, or just to take advantage of the group membership aspect?Just the group membership access.
how would the posts to the forum be stored -- by the API, or by that particular application, using only the API for group membership?The API is just for group membership. A forum application would do it's own thing, it would only query the grouping API to determine groupings.
for the case of a person's account whose password has expired and they need to renew it. On a system using it's own authentication form (even if it is against our Kerberos or LDAP services), it must be configured separately to give out such helpful links and information. Obviously, with n apps all doing their own authentication, all of them need to be configured to do this themselves – duplication of work. Or, even worse, having the external apps not configured at all and they just say, "your password sucks; go away!" with no helpful information.
Any thoughts on community formation and governance.Like... say... a "federation" maybe? Or are you looking for a mailing list to participate in as a developer or as a user? Maybe you're looking for a wiki? Or a place to file bugs? Do you just want to access the source code? I am not sure what you are asking.
Software in this space is uninteresting...I find tomatoes to be uninteresting.
You think that is weird! I am still trying to figure out what happens at 4 AM on the Case Wiki.Whoa!, that is peculiar. Our little server must hate Wednesdays at 4am.
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Although I must say, wordpress, on which my actual website is run, is better.WordPress is an excellent blogging engine and one that I've used myself on several occassions. We get asked a lot why we didn't use it for the Case Blog system. Asked enough that I just now added it to the Info section of the FAQ — Why didn't you use WordPress.
The only reason for not using the Case Blog system is privacy of information. Currently, the privacy controls on the Case Blog service aren't enabled. Perhaps one day...Oh, that's such a can of worms. Shibboleth gets you partway there. You can use something like http://www.openidp.org/ to fill in the last bit of functionality. You can work up a mod_auth(n|z)_sympa that could do some of it, too. The "coolest" idea I have had is mod_authz_foaf. You embed FOAF data directly into your XHTML document or you do a <link type="application/foaf+xml" rel="viewers" href="foo.rdf" /> and only those listed in that FOAF data can view the HTML page. (Hand-wavery must occur for the authn portion of that.) But this is all just crazy-talk.
While RSS is a nice feature, I think it is only a feature, not the answer.You just stick the RSS feed into a named portlet called "Case Daily News Portlet." Then everyone on the portal gets auto-subscribed to it. People who know RSS from a portlet (or people who just don't use the portal), can remove (or never see) the "Case Daily News Portlet" and subscribe (or not) to the feed in a news aggregator. And lest people not forget, each blog comes with a "subscribe to this blog via email" doohickey. So if the blog system were used, you have subscribe/unsubscribe email newsletter plus RSS feeds plus nice archives and URLs plus the searchability-fu plus... Or... ya know... we just carpet-bomb people with emails. That works, too.
There is no syndicated feed available for the informationThere are RSS feeds. Sympa acts as an email-to-RSS gateway for public viewable lists. Albeit, a very rudimentary email->RSS gateway with non-validating syndicated feeds. All it would need is someone to step into Sympa and fix the TT2 templates to output valid Atom. I keep mentioning to Ed that one day... one day... I would sit down with him and we can go through the syndicated feed templates to get them up to snuff. One day... Anyways, you can check out one of the feeds at https://lists.case.edu/wws/rss/latest_arc/blog-admin?count=5.
There is no archive of old editions (again, hopefully an issue with the first version)There are; they are just hidden inside the complexities of Sympa and a couple of run-time tweaks I had to make to get over the first-send kinks. But an archive is there, and once everything is fleshed out, the link into the archive will be easy to find.
implemented with minimal consultation to knowledgeable personnel about the technology involved. I feel that had someone with knowledge of RSS or this blogging system been consulted, the Case Daily would be a totaly different product and this entry would be praising the product instead of despising it.I was consulted and involved in the project since day one. I raised concerns regarding "information overload," "information management", "'interruptable' vs. 'non-interruptable' avenues," and all that. In the end, though, this is the way the people wanted the system to work; thus, it works this way.
FWIW, I have seen that image before.Yea, the image links to the originating post.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.cwru\.
RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://www.case.edu/$1 [L,R=301]
If only WWW ran Apache... it would be see easy.someone should make a favicon for blog.case.edu and planet.case.edu.Made an open request back in March. Nobody came through. I am *not* a graphic designer (emphasis added to indicate a severe deficiency in graphic design). My hands are tied.
Right now, firefox is showing the ebay favicon in firefox for planet caseUmmm... there is no favicon. And my Firefox doesn't display one for planet or blog. Maybe your Firefox is caching something weird??
tags don't show up on Planet Case or on RSS feeds.Sure they do. In the RSS feeds for each blog, they are in the <category> element. Same thing in Planet Case's RSS feed. To make them a little more prominent, I modified Planet Case to show the tags for each entry and included links back to that author's category archive and a link over to the Blog@Case Topics listings.
is this the query you usedThat looks right.
If you did that coding in PHP, I can easily turn it into a Special Page on the wiki. But, you probably did it in Perl :(Actually, I just used phpMyAdmin and some SQL to gather the data. Exported the data to a CSV. Then, used Excel to whip it around into graphs.
Are there other applications on campus currently using RDF for anythingThere will be. And one of the deliverables of the Atom WG will be a canonical way to transfer Atom to RDF and back — an XSLT. Mmmm... SPARQL.
Does WebEvent have an APIIt holds everything in SQL Server, so at the very least, you just plugin to that.
Could a non-ITS project make use of it?You'd have to talk to the administrators of our WebEvent calendar doohickey.
it really is a tall order to create an aggregater that combines so many calendars with not a single standard between any of them.Bah, it's not that hard. Whatever Syndication Feed library you use (like XML::Feed) abstracts away whether the feed is RSS/RDF/Atom. So, that doesn't matter. The only one you have to worry about is iCal. But, it's simple enough to convert iCal -> Atom/RDF and then just process that through your standard Feed lib just like you did with the other feeds. Processing hCalendar would get hairy, so I wouldn't do it (at least, not until v2.0).
Has ITS considered hiring a team of students for the sole purpose of fixing this problem?No. Like I said, I could never get the idea to have any traction.
others would get asked to use the new system.The system would be a read-only thing (at least, at first). Those calendars that emitted RSS/RDF/Atom/iCal could parcipitate. Those that didn't... no harm, no foul. But if they wanted to, all they would need is a little plugin that emitted the data and then the7 get play along, too. That's the beauty of XML over HTTP.
do you think this type of project requires an ITS stamp of approval?Nope.
One problem is the fact that some (generally smaller) calendars amount to a static HTML page with events listed on it. It's more difficult to get useful data out of this than a more structured calendar framework.hCalendar — embed parsable calendar data directly in your XHTML. That's easy enough to parse from a static HTML page.
but exposing users to different wiki syntaxes might be confusing to some.Mmmm... very true. Heck, I get confused going back and forth between the internal and main campus wikis. The wiki people need to all get together and agree to all user Markdown at the core and extend their wiki syntaxes to tailor to each specific wiki's needs.
we shouldn't discourage using the Case Wiki in ways that are not optimally designed for wikis.Oh, I agree. I don't mean to discourage use of the wiki. I was just thinking aloud about alternatives that could be put into place that would better serve some of the more common use-case scenarios.
Here at Case, though, I can't just (say) look at the CUPS configuration for the Wade printers to figure out what I need to do to my machine to make printing work. Instead, I have to either poke at things until they work, or ask the help desk like a muggle.As a side note related to the above quote, there are a lot of intricacies to the Case network and services that go undocumented. We are hoping that the Wiki can enable our users to help us fill in some of those gaps for all of us. For example, http://wiki.case.edu/CUPS.
there are some definite concerns about server loadWhat? What concerns?
"what about dispatching an email every time I post a comment so I can track where I've been"If you check out any of the newer blogs, they are created with notifier abilities in them. For example, check out my most recent entry, http://blog.case.edu/jms18/2005/09/27/trying_to_measure_mirapoints_effectiveness. Look on the sidebar on the right at the bottom. There is a form that says:
Subscribe to this Entry via Email - Receive an email every time the entry "Trying to Measure Mirapoint's Effectiveness" is updated or commented upon.So, something like that is available. If you want to add it to your blog's entries, instructions are available at http://blog.case.edu/jms18/2005/04/04/new_features_email_subscriptions_and_gravatars.
how did you get your code chunk to land in its own scrollable box?
pre {
border: solid 1px black;
color: black;
background-color: silver;
margin-top: 10px;
margin-bottom: 10px;
margin-left: 30px;
margin-right: 50px;
padding: 1em;
overflow: auto;
width: auto;
width:expression(document.body.clientWidth > 450? "450px": "auto" );
}
.code, code
{
font-size: 8pt;
font-family: Courier;
color: black;
}
the mysterious and powerful blog adminOh c'mon. I am not that "mysterious and powerful."
The bottom line is that MediaWiki has a lot of publishing power, something that many content management systems lack. If that power could be harness while maintaining control over who yields that power, the result would be a great CMS.You could make the same case for a blogging system. (Have you ever seen a person using a wiki-based system as a bloggin system -- it's sad.) There is a middle ground in all of this -- CMSs, weblogs, wikis.
why not hand-rolled pages?No syndicated feeds. No permanent URLs. No usable and search engine friendly URLs. Granted, one needn't use MT (or any CMS, for that matter) to accomplish all of those goals. It's just a matter of choosing a tool for the job. I guess, if one were so inclined, one could mish-mash together a series of small scripts and processing hand-edited HTML that accomplished all of that functionality.... ... If one were so inclined. I would refer to that person as a "wheel reinventer."
You should add that HTML:
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://blog.case.edu/bcg8/images/favicon.ico" >
To your individual entry archives, too.
I also wish I had access to the stylesheets and such, but that's the designer in me crying out, ha!Why don't you have access to the stylesheets?
For a group blog to be successful, one person must be really involved and push its use.I agree. It seems that an "evangelist" is needed for a blog to work. One person that would be willingly to make sure the tide stays high enough for all of the boaters (a.k.a. authors) to reap rewards.
You could just go to [[Security Reports]] on the Case Wiki and see a Google Map of all reported incidents. This would all be taken from a geo-tagged RSS feed produced by Campus Security using the Blog@Case system of course.Man, if we get that setup, we HAVE to make sure to get the Security People using the system.
Does anyone have any experience with software for creating of web-based tutorials?Screencasting. Not the easiest thing to produce, but very worthwhile. Some info on screencasting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screencast http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2005/06/13/primetime.html An small (5 minute) example screencast, Jon Udell talking about del.icio.us: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/gems/delicious.html
Is it going to be possible for non ITS systems (like, for instance, the ones I develop for my department) to tie into the SSO system in the future?Oh yes. As of right now, we've had many inquiries into doing so; but no one has actually deployed one. Hopefully, that will change. Documentation for doing so is located at https://its-services.case.edu/middleware/docs
deb ftp://cwrulug.cwru.edu/debian/ stable main non-free contrib deb-src ftp://cwrulug.cwru.edu/debian/ stable main non-free contrib Oh wait, this should go on the Wiki somewhere...I intend to keep writing in his blog until Case takes it away from me, at which point, I plan to download all of my entries and import them into a new blog... Letting this get erased would be kind of like burning a journalNicole, to put your mind at a bit of ease, there are no plans nor any discussions of plans to ever "reclaim" a Blog@Case weblog. I am a very strong proponent of permanent URLs, so I don't ever see that becoming the case. However, in terms of a person's access to his or her Blog@Case blog, well... that one is still up in the air. When a person changes from a "student@case.edu" to an "alum@case.edu," right now, yes, that person will no longer be able to log in to his or her blog to create new posts. That would all be solved by opening up access to the blogs to Case alumni. Which may happen. We're still trying to run the numbers on how much something like that would cost. I think we should, but numbers speak louder than an engineer just saying we should.
I've been toying with the idea of trying some podcasting, but since the FAQ is a bit silent on how to podcastWhoops! Yea, my bad; my bad. I'll hopefully clear that up. In actuality, it should be as easy as just linking to a .mp3 file in one of your blog posts. Erm... I think. I'll need to check how I have MT-Enclosures (the podcast plugin) configured. But, that's how it is supposed to work. Link to a .mp3 file in a blog post and your RSS feed automatically gets the <enclose> element.
if the web framework you're using requires a URL rewriting mechanism, maybe there are bigger problems you should worry about...If the web framework you're using locks you into a specific URL scheme, well, you may be having problems. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with using mod_rewrite to clean up URLs which couldn't be constructed cleanly to begin with. Obviously, try to make the URLs clean naturally; use mod_rewrite as the exception. And, if you suddenly decide to wisk your application away from Apache+mod_rewrite to another web server that doesn't have any kind of URL remapping functionality, it's your own damn fault for picking a shoddy web server. And, can we please get off the "your programming language is a bad programming language because I've seen people write bad code in that language" arguments? They're just foolish. Writing code in .jsp, .asp, .py doesn't suddenly turn a dumb software developer into a smart one — you can give an idiot a better hammer, but you'll never stop that idiot from hitting himself with it.
P.S. Jeremy, you're going to want to archive that post about branding your departmental blog.Assuming I have my way, blogs well never be deleted because Cool URIs don't change. So, it should be around.
I think it would be really useful to have a permanent time stamp with each posting. A lot of the blogs I read seem to have this feature.You can using the following tags in your templates:
<$MTEntryDate$> That will stick the date of your entry in your web page.Done! Instructions and information are located at the FAQ.When people post a comment to an old posting, it generates an email to the blogger but does not get posted. I found out quite by accident that I have to log in to blog@case, click on the "comments" link, and personally approve the comment. I think that may be the reason why Megan Quick's friend's comment did not get posted.
Could the instructions for doing this be part of the email sent to the blogger?
I am still looking for employment for the summer, so if anyone from TIS is reading this and would like my servicesWe, in Middleware (which are the peeps who do the Web Services stuff), are looking for another student employee. Shoot me an email, and we can set something up.
Regarding the standard template, what if we did a variation of http://blog.case.edu/directory/?The directory looks pretty good. I think a template based on that would work well.
Not sure of how deep your control of this application isComplete control. It's just some Perl code, after all. I can muck with it all day and night and then some.
Have you considered tweeking the interface for adding new catergories to a persons blog?That could get pretty involved.
Have a couple of example categories, a link to a list of popular categories"Recently Popular" or "Popular" in general? Or, even, "Popular Categories You Have That Are Often Used by Others." Man, it could get really hairy.
and a link explaining why using the same categories as other people is cool.That would work so long as you labor under the assumption that people follow helpful links to documentation that would benefit them. Unfortunately, I do not labor under that assumption because I, myself, don't follow such links.
you could try some social engineering in the interface to get people to chose the categories you want them to.But, how could I determine what categories to suggest to them? I could scan the content they are creating, see that they have an IMG tag in there and suggest "Photo." Or, I could parse out any hyperlinks they have included in the content, determine who else in the Blog@Case system has linked to those same URLs, and suggest those categories other people have used... The Law of Diminishing Returns is started to become enacted here.
what if you just focus on teaching people to use del.icio.us to keep track of posts by others in the Blog@Case community that were of interest to them, and to tag them with Blog@Case and whatever other categories they think are relevant?That's an interesting idea, and that could very well happen on its own. If it did happen (i.e. people started tagging such in that way), I would certainly begin using it (in some nefarious way or another).
So, I built this page last week: http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/blogbuilder/sysadmin/topCategories.sprAhhh, that's nice stuff, Kieran.
Hi Jeremy, have you taken a look at K-Collector?Yes, I got as far as this page where I read:
k-collector is an enterprise knowledge aggregator that leverages the power of social softare, weblogs and shared topics to present new ways of...I believe I, then, closed my browser.
I also wonder if the woman who spoke to me has any idea that the whole conversation and my impression of it is being posted to the internet more or less immediately--and what she would think if she did know.Heh...
what the distinction was between 'hits' and 'number of visits'. Also, what constitutes a 'page'?AWStats has a glossary here – http://awstats.sourceforge.net/docs/awstats_glossary.html – that should explain the distinctions.
How about a semi-branded pageWinner!
Having gone this far, it ocurrs to me that I might as well have gone all the way and used a (gasp!) table...Which is, actually, not un-called for. It is a table of data... a listing of data that can easily be put in a table; so, it would not upset my semantic undertones if it were tabular.
and reading as much as possible of Building Web Services with Java by Steve Graham et. al. for my thesis work.Sounds interesting. What's your thesis on?
the same bug that makes the "Recently Updated Blogs" on the Blog@Case homepage a little less than reliable. Sometimes older posts stay at the top or reappear mysteriously.The "Recently Updated Blogs" used to key on the database field "created_on" to determine which are the newest blog entries. However, that field is user-settable (it's the field in the create-an-entry page at the bottom labeled "published on"). So, a person could continually have his or her entry on the top of the list by setting the data to May 5, 2010 or something. So, I switched the plugin to key of the machine-set "modified_on" DB field. This had the unfortunate side-effect of, whenever someone updates their blog entry, it reappears at the top of the list. What I really need is another DB field that gets set by the machine when a blog entry is first published and never changes upon subsequent modifications.
Just to let you know, I'm working on something.Thank God. I was beginning to think that was how I would have had to leave it.
I was distracted by what looks like a bug in the 'last updated' dates for some blogs--namely, mine (fuzzyblog) and yours (Jeremy Smith's Blog), both of which the directory claims were last udpated some time in December.Whoa, yea. Okay, I'll fix that one.
Jeremy's the Perl hackerI've actually done far more PHP than I have Perl.
I think it would be beneficial if central IT offered a product/solution that would make it easy and efficient to develop web sites. A simple web script to take content, render it in the Case template, and output to static files is more than sufficient for most sites.Uhhh.... you mean.... uhhh... the blog server? http://blog.case.edu/its-news http://blog.case.edu/case-news http://blog.case.edu/orgs/cgreal http://blog.case.edu/colleges/ArtSci
I believe that in the end it pretty much comes down to personal preference.Now, that's just crazy talk. You should always listen when one person tells you that their favorite programming language is better than yours. Always. With that in mind, LISP RULES!
Python is at the TOP of my list for web development. Perl? PLEASE. Talk about obsolete... PHP? It may be easy to pick up, but it too is a design nightmare. It's like the C of the web!Python. C'mon, man, Python is sooooooo 2003. Get with it, Ruby is where it's at!
these are useful for everything from spam filteringInteresting... do you have some more juicy information on such a topic. I am assuming it is sufficiently different than normal Bayesian techniques.
I thought also about the possibility of having the News Center incorporate some rss... both for receiving Case news from other news outlets, and for pushing out Case news TO others.Yea, that would be nice.
A third that you bring up may be the News Center having it's own 'group blog'. Several other departments, centers, etc could be good candidates for this as well. Is that possible? i.e. a Department of Whatever... blog. (?) Can they be set up on the Group level, without having ownership by ONE particular CaseID?Oh yes. We are looking for groups/organizations/departments to pilot group blogging. We will be making an announcement on the front page shortly asking for volunteers. If you have any good candidates, that would be great.
www.case.edu/news/ Kevin and I have already been discussing ways of using RSS feeds for that. The time is ripe.Indeed. An RSS feed for that would be great.
I am always fascinated by glimpses of what is lurking behind all the things we now take for granted.This is one of the main uses I think Blog@Case can do for ITS. Make things a little more transparent and bring the conversation to a personal level. I wish more ITS-ers would blog.
And that I took it to the river thinking that she was young lad, but had husband. It was the night of Santiago and almost by commitment. The lights were extinguished and the crickets ignited. In the last corners I touched its sleepy chests, and they were opened to me suddenly like branches of jacinths. The starch of his enagua sounded in the ear like a piece of silk torn by dÃÂez knives to me. Without light of silver in their glasses the trees have grown, and a horizon of dogs barks very far from the river. Passed the zarzamoras, the rushes and the hawthorns, under its bush of hair I made a hole on the slime. I took off the necktie. It took off the dress. I, the belt with revolver, she, its four bodices. Neither nardos nor conches have the so fine skin, nor crystals with moon relumbran with that brightness. Their thighs escaped to me like surprised fish, half full of fire, half full of cold. That night I ran the best one of the ways, mounted in potra of nacre without bridles and stirrups. I do not mean, by man, the things that she said to me. The light of the understanding very makes me be been moderate. Dirty of kisses and sand I took it of the river. With the air the swords of the irises were fought. I behaved like who I am, like a legitimate gypsy. I gave a great costurero, of flat pajizo, and I did not want to fall in love because having husband it said me that she was young lad when took it to the riverHmmm... I feel as if something was lost in the translation.
I have decided that ultimately the blog (for me at least) is going to be a place-holder for those ideas and thoughts that I have to get off my chest but which are not ready for prime-time (i.e., publication as a book or articles).I think that's an excellent use of a blog by a researcher.
When I wanted to reply to Vincenzo and Jeremy, clicking on jms8 took me to Jeremy's blog but vincenzo.liberatore did not work.It depends on how the person filled in the "Post a comment" form. If the person supplied a URL, the name of the commenter appears in a hyperlink that links back to the URL that s/he supplied. If the person supplies only an email address, then the link of the commenter takes the form of a
mailto: hyperlink. So, in theory, if the person supplied just an email address, then you could click on it and your desktop operating system should pick it up and pass it off to your default email handler. But, yea, that's the "streamlined" version. I think that just leaving comments works well, too.
<form method="get" action="<$MTCGIPath$><$MTSearchScript$>" name="searchForm" id="searchForm">
<input type="hidden" name="IncludeBlogs" value="<$MTBlogID$>" />
<input accesskey="4" id="search" name="search" value="Search Terms" size="20" />
<a href="#" class="navBarLink" id="searchLink" onclick="document.searchForm.submit();">Search</a>
</form>
UCITE will be organizing a faculty session on using blogs later this semester to let people know what it is and its availability here.UCITE? What's UCITE? Will this session be open to anyone? I'd like to attend.
Just noticed that the time stamp on my earlier comment 9:22 AM is about 20 minutes later than the actual time of posting. Any reason for this?The server use NTP to keep its clock in sync with the rest of the world. But, for some reason, it runs fast. I'll check with the Server Engineers and see if I can't get that corrected (or, at least, get an explanation).
mailprogramdeliveryinfo. If that's the case, MT has an XML-RPC interface. We could have the script on the mail server use that API to perform the posting of the message. Hmmm... wait, no. The XML-RPC interface requires the user's credentials. We would have to make a superuser and give that superuser "create an entry" permission on everyone's blog. I don't like that. If we did some NFS mount magic, it might be easier.
From: jms18@case.edu
To: jms18@blog.case.edu
Subject: [Secret Word] Check Out the Digs
Body: Yada yada yada
Obviously, the secret word would be configurable by the user. This all still means I need to run an email server on the blog machine. *sigh*